Evidently
the president’s trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up:
The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the
21st century could pay homage to the world’s leading practitioner of
nonviolence during the first half of the 20th century. So the
White House announced plans for George W. Bush to lay a wreath at the
Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi.

While audacious in
its shameless and extreme hypocrisy, this PR gambit is in character for
the world’s only superpower. One of the main purposes of the Bush regime’s
media spin is to depict reality as its opposite. And Karl Rove obviously
figured that mainstream U.S. media outlets, with few exceptions, wouldn’t
react with anywhere near the appropriate levels of derision or outrage.

Presidential
rhetoric aside, Gandhi’s enthusiasm for nonviolence is nearly matched by
Bush’s enthusiasm for violence. The commander in chief regularly proclaims
his misty-eyed pride in U.S. military actions that destroy countless human
lives with massive and continual techno-violence. But the Bushian isn’t
quite 180 degrees from the Gandhian. The president of the United States is
not exactly committed to violence; what he wants is an end to resistance.

“A conqueror is
always a lover of peace,” the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz
observed. Yearning for Uncle Sam to fulfill his increasingly farfetched
promise of victory in Iraq, the U.S. president is an evangelist for peace
-- on his terms.

Almost two years
ago, in early April 2004, the icy cerebral pundit George Will engaged in a
burst of candor when he wrote a column about the widening bloodshed inside
Iraq: “In the war against the militias, every door American troops crash
through, every civilian bystander shot -- there will be many -- will make
matters worse, for a while. Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation
remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on
violence.”

The column --
headlined “A War President’s Job” in the Washington Post --
diagnosed the problem and prescribed more violence. Lots more: “Now
Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary
to disarm or defeat Iraq’s urban militias, which replicate the problem of
modern terrorism -- violence that has slipped the leash of states.” For
unleashing the Pentagon’s violence, the rationales are inexhaustible.

In an important
sense, it’s plausible to envision Bush as a lover of peace and even an
apostle of nonviolence -- but, in context, those sterling invocations of
virtues are plated with sadism in the service of empire. The president of
the United States is urging “peace” as a synonym for getting his way in
Iraq. From Washington, the most exalted vision of peace is a scenario
where the occupied no longer resist the American occupiers or their
allies.

The world has seen
many such leaders, eager to unleash as much violence as necessary to get
what they want, and glad to praise nonviolence whenever convenient. But no
photo-op can change the current reality that the world’s most powerful
government is also, by far, the most violent and the most dangerous.